Automatic building extraction has been applied in many domains. It is also a challenging problem because of the complex scenes and multiscale. Deep learning algorithms, especially fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), have shown robust feature extraction ability than traditional remote sensing data processing methods. However, hierarchical features from encoders with a fixed receptive field perform weak ability to obtain global semantic information. Local features in multiscale subregions cannot construct contextual interdependence and correlation, especially for large-scale building areas, which probably causes fragmentary extraction results due to intra-class feature variability. In addition, low-level features have accurate and fine-grained spatial information for tiny building structures but lack refinement and selection, and the semantic gap of across-level features is not conducive to feature fusion. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an FCN framework based on the residual network and provides the training pattern for multi-modal data combining the advantage of high-resolution aerial images and LiDAR data for building extraction. Two novel modules have been proposed for the optimization and integration of multiscale and across-level features. In particular, a multiscale context optimization module is designed to adaptively generate the feature representations for different subregions and effectively aggregate global context. A semantic guided spatial attention mechanism is introduced to refine shallow features and alleviate the semantic gap. Finally, hierarchical features are fused via the feature pyramid network. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, experimental results demonstrate superior performance with 93.19 IoU, 97.56 OA on WHU datasets and 94.72 IoU, 97.84 OA on the Boston dataset, which shows that the proposed network can improve accuracy and achieve better performance for building extraction.
High-resolution lidar data from the west Susitna area, Southcentral, Alaska